‘We cannot – and will not – stand for the routine violence or the default dehumanization of black bodies.’
Photograph: Anna Webber/Getty Images for The New Yorker

Black Americans are in challenging, critical times. We matter enough to sell out concert stadiums and win prestigious awards touting our intellectual prowess – as Claudia Rankine did this week, when she won the MacArthur genius grant. But we don’t matter enough to keep us from being murdered by the police. There is something devastatingly perverse about that fact.

Claudia Rankine’s win is one of the best things to happen to black folks in 2016. Her award, along with those of her fellow black recipients in this year’s MacArthur crop – the art historian and curator Kellie Jones, the film-maker Barry Jacobs-Jenkins and the sculptor Joyce Scott – signals a moment of nationwide reckoning. It is also a reminder that we cannot – and will not – stand for the routine violence or the default dehumanization of black bodies.

Rankine is not just seeking to shift the cultural dialogue, although that is important too. She is “trying to change the discourse of black people being equated with criminality and murdered inside a culture where white fear has justified the continued incarceration, murder of blacks and other people of color”.

When Rankine won the grant, she told the Los Angeles Times she felt “the prize is being given to the subject” of race. Rankine is perhaps the first black recipient to make resolutely clear that the subject of race is bigger than any given individual. It also makes the MacArthur Foundation a model for institutions prioritizing the need to deconstruct and decentralize whiteness in America – a construct which is directly linked to police killings.

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Rankine may use some of the MacArthur money for what she is calling the Racial Imaginary Institute. It’s a project that was in development before she won the award, which she says will be “an interdisciplinary arts and cultural laboratory for the dismantling of white dominance”. Amen.

In all of her work, Rankine reminds us that what black folks do as a culture – one that has never squandered anything, was never meant to be here, much less thrive and achieve – can be used to further the effort of cultivating a sense of agency without asking for permission. This is the very best of what Black Lives Matter and other black activists stand for: we are not here for the validation, we are here for each other – the living and the dead.

Long before she won the MacArthur, Rankine was an ambassador of this truth and visionary mandate. “Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation,” Rankine wrote in an essay for the New York Times last year, “Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us.”

And as we celebrate the successes of black culture luminaries like Rankine, who push past limitations, cast aside America’s glaring white gaze and exceed societal expectations, we continue to recognize our daily losses to the police and institutional racism everywhere. How poignant and essential, then, that our artists – the oracles of our magnificent, messy existence – build on this paradox in rigorous, centered and imaginative ways, every day.